ASUS GeForce GTX 780 Ti Matrix review

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Conclusion

Conclusion

The Matrix Platinum edition of the GeForce GTX 780 Ti is a truly superb piece of hardware, it comes with an excellent design and rock-solid performance thanks to the massive factory tweak that ASUS already applied for you. The reality remains though that it has been built to please the sub-zero overclockers and given the right conditions this card is gonna set records with its impressive VRM design. Unfortunately for the 99.99% of us that sticks with the standard cooling setup and non-hardwired voltage levels, the product isn't very different in terms of tweaking then any other GTX 780 Ti. This has very little to do with the hardware, but has everything to do with NVIDIA who has been enforcing all kinds of limiters over the past year or two on their products. These days we have power limiters, voltage limiters, temperature limiters and so on. Basically the golden rule of thumb is this, all cards clock roughly in the same region as long as cooling is sufficient enough. Considering this card will get a fairly steep price premium you do need to wonder if it is worth investing the extra dough for pretty much the same results. I mean, you could get a DirectCU II version for a much lower price and get almost the same results and cooling/ noise levels. Now let me state clearly, I am not downplaying this card. It is truly excellent ... a superb piece of hardware with great a design and terrific components. Heck, the performance that the ASUS GeForce GTX Matrix is able to deliver is excellent, the DirectCU based cooler is very silent and keeps this GPU chilled down under 70 Degrees C temperature. One big distinction however is the very high factory clock frequency, ASUS factory clocked this product at 1006 MHz on the base-clock, 1072 MHz on the boost clock, which is VERY nice coming from a reference 875 MHz base-clock.


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Aesthetics

This ROG Matrix edition graphics card comes with a DirectCU based cooler and is roughly 10 to 15 degrees Celsius cooler/lower opposed to the reference cooler whist remaining silent. This revision is a dual-slot solution with two distinct fans, which I think just looks great. The PCB is massivley customized and I can only spot quality components ensuring a longer lifespan of this product, lovely. The looks then, well the cooler in its all black design, the two subtle and silent fans combined with a hint of red is just fantastic. The card is also very sturdy. There is a metal plate at the top of the card so the card cannot bend when seated horizontally in the PC, also present is a full cover back-plate. Gorgous to look at, that is for sure.

Cooling & Noise Levels

The NVIDIA reference coolers do their job well, but they follow the temperature target of 80 Degrees C. With the ROG Matrix cooling the temperature will stay at sub 70 Degrees C as reported back by the thermal sensor. Which is on par with what we can measure with our infrared thermal camera. Also the VRM area us running okay roughly at 80 Degrees C, this is much better then the DirectCU II edition we recently tested. Noise levels then , one word -- fantastic .. the product is very silent. Unless you flick it in LN2 mode, then it'll become noisy. But for 99.99% of you the LN2 mode is not relevant whatsoever.

Power Consumption

The GK110B Kepler based products are rated having a 250 Watt TDP, we measure that to be a little higher though, roughly 260 to 265 Watts (under full stress). But at this performance level, that is absolutely okay. That 250 Watt TDP also will make running multi-GPU solutions a bit easier. With two cards we think an 800 Watt PSU would be sufficient. So while it's not great to have a GPU consuming up 250 Watt it could have been a lot worse, really. Also let me state that we measure peak power consumption, the average power consumption is a good notch lower depending on GPU utilization.

Game Performance

The GeForce GTX 780 Ti in most scenarios will be 5 to 10% faster than the GTX Titan, comparing towards GTX 680 it seems 40% faster. Drivers wise we can't complain at all, we did not stumble into any issues. And with a single GPU there's no micro-stuttering (if that ever bothered you) and no multi-GPU driver issues to fight off. Performance wise, really there's not one game that won't run seriously good at the very best image quality settings. You should game with a nice 30" monitor of course, at 2560x1440/1600. I mean Battlefield 4 at Ultra quality is still oozing out 65+ FPS there.

For those that are going with Ultra HD, one card can be sufficient if you drop MSAA or AA related settings. If that is something you dislike, then two of these cards obviously will for-fill your your wishes really well.

Overclocking

The card is already clocked for you at 1006 MHz with an allowance to boost towards 1072 MHz. This GPU can take 1100~1150 MHz fairly easily really, and at that stage you added another 10% performance already. Our tweak made the GPU boosting at roughly 1175~1200 MHz (depending on temperature, power draw and load). This was the absolute max though as passing that frequency easily would get us into crashing problems. This result is fairly similar on all GTX 780 Ti cards, mind you that you do not really need a voltage tweak. That way this 2880 Shader processor card at a boost frequency of 1200+ MHz this way only consumes 10~15 Watts more, which is pretty nice. 

Flicking the BIOS to LN2 mode did not help with overclocking.


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Concluding

ASUS offers a tremendously impressive GTX 780 Ti with the Matrix edition. It is a silent product (atd efault BIOS mode), looks great, cools really well and has a very impressive factory overclock. As stated, tweaking/overclocking wise all GTX 780 Ti cards with a proper cooler will halt at roughly 1200 MHz on the boost frequency, give or take 50 MHz. And that is the result of NVIDIA managing and throttling everything they can on the GPU. To bypass all that you'll need to hardware wire the card to get proper voltage levels in it and then apply some serious cooling. That is not for 99.9% of you guys, so that makes these extremely expensive cards a bit hard to sell over a cheaper version of the card that returns similar results. Regardless of that remark, the Matrix edition is downright terrific in design, looks and component selection. Cooling wise we measure sub 70 Degrees C on the thermal probe. Overall the ASUS GeForce GTX 780 Ti Matrix is a very sturdy build with quality components, it's very fast in performance as it even can pass the mighty GeForce GTX Titan for less money. Fluid like game-play is what you get back in return whilst you enable the most intensive image quality settings. And isn't that what it is all about with PC gaming ? We can most certainly recommend the ASUS GeForce GTX 780 Matrix edition if you have the money to spare, it is a terrific product with a high factory overclock and very nice low noise levels. Aside from the TBA pricetag, what's not to like ? As such recommended by Guru3D.com

We are still awaiting a final MSRP pricing of this product from ASUS, but we think this product will run upwards to 750 to 800 EUR.

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